Source

• Born: 3 April 1783
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: 28 November 1859
• Best Known As: Author of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

A grand old man of American letters, Washington Irving created two famous characters: the sleepyhead Rip Van Winkle and the scarifying Headless Horseman from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Both appeared in the 1820 collection The Sketch Book, which Irving published under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon. The hit book made Irving the first American author to gain real fame in Europe. Late in life Irving wrote a colossal five-volume biography of George Washington, and his biography of Christopher Columbus is still considered a classic.

Irving was named for George Washington; his parents were admirers of General Washington... From 1842-46, Irving served as U.S. ambassador to Spain... Irving is indirectly responsible for the name of the NBA's New York Knicks. Irving wrote A History of New York in 1809 under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker; the term "Knickerbocker" came to mean anyone from New York.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), author and critic. If this great early American writer is best remembered for his biographies, histories, and romantic short stories, he was also an important, if largely indirectly so, figure in the American theatre of his day. Among his first published pieces were “The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.,” which were serialized in 1802–03 in the New York Morning Chronicle and also published separately and which offered his personal views of contemporary plays and performers. Further observations on the theatre, usually satirical and not nearly as important, appeared in Salmagundi, which he wrote in 1807–08 with his brother, William, and J. K. Paulding. Both in America and in Europe, where he spent some time, Irving made many important theatrical friends, including John Howard Payne, with whom he collaborated on half a dozen plays, the most important of which were Charles the Second; or, The Merry Monarch (1824) and Richelieu, A Domestic Tragedy (1826). The former enjoyed widespread popularity but the failure of the latter and other works prompted Irving to write to Payne, “I am sorry to say I cannot afford to write any more for the theatre. . . . The experiment has satisfied me that I should never at any time be compensated for my trouble.” In the long run, it was other men's adaptations of his stories, especially Rip Van Winkle, that made him an enduring figure in our theatre.

Considered the first professional man of letters in the United States, Washington Irving (1783-1859) was influential in the development of the short story form and helped to gain international respect for fledgling American literature.

Following the tradition of the eighteenth-century essay exemplified by the elegant, lightly humorous prose of Joseph Addison and Oliver Goldsmith, Irving created endearing and often satiric short stories and sketches. In his most-acclaimed work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), he wove elements of myth and folklore into narratives, such as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, " that achieved almost immediate classic status. Although Irving was also renowned in his lifetime for his extensive work in history and biography, it was through his short stories that he most strongly influenced American writing in subsequent generations and introduced a number of now-familiar images and archetypes into the body of the national literature.

Irving was born and raised in New York City, the youngest of eleven children of a prosperous merchant family. A dreamy and ineffectual student, he apprenticed himself in a law office rather than follow his elder brothers to nearby Columbia College. In his free time, he read avidly and wandered when he could in the misty, rolling Hudson River Valley, an area steeped in local folklore and legend that would serve as an inspiration for his later writings.

As a nineteen-year-old, Irving began contributing satirical letters under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle to a newspaper owned by his brother Peter. His first book, Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others (1807-08), was a collaboration with another brother, William, and their friend James Kirke Paulding. This highly popular collection of short pieces poked fun at the political, social, and cultural life of the city. Irving enjoyed a second success in 1809 with A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, a comical, deliberately inaccurate account of New York's Dutch colonization narrated by the fictitious Diedrich Knickerbocker, a fusty, colorful Dutch-American. His carefree social life and literary successes were shadowed at this time, however, by the death of his fiancee, Matilda Hoffmann, and for the next several years he floundered, wavering between a legal, mercantile, and editorial career. In 1815 he moved to England to work in the failing Liverpool branch of the family import-export business. Within three years the company was bankrupt, and, finding himself at age thirty-five without means of support, Irving decided that he would earn his living by writing. He began recording the impressions, thoughts, and descriptions which, polished and repolished in his meticulous manner, became the pieces that make up The Sketch Book. The volume was brought out under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon, who was purportedly a good-natured American roaming Britain on his first trip abroad.

The Sketch Book comprises some thirty parts: about half English sketches, four general travel reminiscences, six literary essays, two descriptions of the American Indian, three essentially unclassifiable pieces, and three short stories: "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,"and "The Spectre Bridegroom." Although only the last-named tale is set in Germany, all three stories draw upon the legends of that country. The book was published almost concurrently in the United States and England in order to escape the piracy to which literary works were vulnerable before international copyright laws, a shrewd move that many subsequent authors copied. The miscellaneous nature of The Sketch Book was an innovation that appealed to a broad range of readers; the work received a great deal of attention and sold briskly, and Irving found himself America's first international literary celebrity. In addition, the book's considerable profits allowed Irving to devote himself full-time to writing.

Remaining abroad for more than a decade after the appearance of The Sketch Book, Irving wrote steadily, capitalizing on his international success with two subsequent collections of tales and sketches that also appeared under the name Geoffrey Crayon. Bracebridge Hall; or, the Humorists: A Medley (1822) centers loosely around a fictitious English clan that Irving had introduced in several of the Sketch Book pieces. Bracebridge Hall further describes their manners, customs, and habits, and interjects several unrelated short stories, including "The Student from Salamanca" and "The Stout Gentleman." Tales of a Traveller (1824) consists entirely of short stories arranged in four categories: European stories, tales of London literary life, accounts of Italian bandits, and narrations by Irving's alter-ego, Diedrich Knickerbocker. The most enduring of these, according to many critics, are "The German Student," which some consider a significant early example of supernatural fiction, and "The Devil and Tom Walker," a Yankee tale that like "Rip Van Winkle" draws upon myth and legend for characters and incident. After 1824 Irving increasingly turned his attention from fiction and descriptive writing toward history and biography. He lived for several years in Spain, serving as a diplomatic attache to the American legation while writing a life of Christopher Columbus and a history of Granada. During this period he also began gathering material for The Alhambra (1832), a vibrantly romantic collection of sketches and tales centered around the Moorish palace in Granada.

Irving served as secretary to the American embassy in London from 1829 until 1832, when he returned to the United States. After receiving warm accolades from the literary and academic communities, he set out on a tour of the rugged western part of the country, which took him as far as Oklahoma. The expedition resulted in three books about the region, notably A Tour on the Prairies (1835), which provided easterners with their first description of life out west by a well-known author. Irving eventually settled near Tarrytown, New York, at a small estate on the Hudson River, which he named Sunnyside. Apart from four years in Madrid and Barcelona, which he spent as President John Tyler's minister to Spain, Irving lived there the rest of his life. Among the notable works of his later years is an extensive biography of George Washington, which Irving worked on determinedly, despite ill health, from the early 1850s until a few months before his death in 1859.

The Sketch Book prompted the first widespread critical response to Irving's writings. Reviewers in the United States were generally delighted with the work of their native son, and even English critics, normally hostile in that era to American authors, accorded the book generally favorable - if somewhat condescending - notice. Among the pieces singled out for praise in the early reviews were most frequently the three short stories, particularly "Rip Van Winkle." Critics found Irving's style pleasingly elegant, fine, and humorous, although some, including Richard Henry Dana, perceived a lack of intellectual content beneath the decorative surface. Dana also observed that in adopting the authorial persona of Geoffrey Crayon - with his prose style modeled after the eighteenth-century essayists - Irving lost the robustness, high color, and comic vigor of his previous incarnations as Jonathan Oldstyle, Launcelot Langstaff, and Diedrich Knickerbocker, an observation that was echoed by later critics. Subsequent "Crayon" works, such as Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra, while generally valued for their prose style, tended to prompt such complaints as that by the Irish author Maria Edgeworth that "the workmanship surpasses the work."

Beginning in the 1950s, however, critics began to explore technical and thematic innovations in Irving's short stories. These include the integration of folklore, myth, and fable into narrative fiction; setting and landscape as a reflection of theme and mood; the expression of the supernatural and use of Gothic elements in some stories; and the tension between imagination and creativity versus materialism and productivity in nineteenth-century America. Many critics read Rip's twenty-year sleep as a rejection of the capitalistic values of his society - ferociously personified by the shrewish Dame Van Winkle - and an embracing of the world of the imagination. Ichabod Crane, too, has been viewed by such critics as Robert Bone as representing the outcast artist-intellectual in American society, although he has been considered, conversely, as a caricature of the acquisitive, scheming Yankee Puritan, a type that Irving lampooned regularly in his early satirical writings.

Today, many critics concur with Fred Lewis Pattee's assertion that the "American short story began in 1819 with Washington Irving." Commentators agree, moreover, that in "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving established an artistic standard and model for subsequent generations of American short story writers. As George Snell wrote: "It is quite possible to say that Irving unconsciously shaped a principal current in American fiction, whatever may be the relative unimportance of his own work." In their continuing attention to the best of Irving's short fiction, critics affirm that while much of Irving's significance belongs properly to literary history, such stories as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" belong to literary art.

Further Reading

Bleiler, E. F., editor, Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror 2: A. E. Coppard to Roger Zelazny, Scribners, 1985, pp. 685-91.

Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon, Washington Irving, Twayne, 1981.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: Colonization to the American Renaissance, 1640-1865, Gale, 1988.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 3: Antebellum Writers in New York and the South, 1979, Volume 11: American Humorists, 1800-1950, 1982, Volume 30: American Historians, 1607-1865, 1984, Volume 59: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1800-1850, 1987, Volume 73: American Magazine Journalists 1741-1850, 1988, Volume 74: American Short-Story Writers before 1880, 1988.

Harbert, Earl N., and Robert A. Rees, editor, Fifteen American Authors before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Hedges, William L., Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832, Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

Leary, Lewis, Washington Irving, University of Minnesota Press, 1963.

For more information on Washington Irving, visit Britannica.com.

Irving, Washington (1783–1859), American author of essays, travel books, biographies, and true and legendary histories. His first notable success, A History of New York (1809), supposedly written by the fictitious Diedrich Knickerbocker, created a legendary history for his native city while satirizing both its early Dutch inhabitants and contemporary American politicians. Irving's strong interest in folklore also influenced The Alhambra (1832), which incorporates several Moorish legends, gracefully retold, into an account of his stay in Granada. He is most famous for two stories included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20): ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’. While the ‘Legend’ pokes fun at Ichabod Crane's superstitious credulity, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is a genuine fairy tale—the first with a distinctively American flavour. Irving successfully transposed the European motif of the enchanted sleeper to his own Hudson River Valley, substituting for the traditional fairy revellers the explorer Hendrick Hudson and his crew. Both stories have inspired numerous painters, illustrators (including Arthur Rackham and N. C. Wyeth), cartoonists, and dramatists. A stage version of Rip Van Winkle (1860) starring Joseph Jefferson was one of the longest‐running hits in the history of the American theatre, while the plots of ‘Rip’ and ‘The Legend’ were ingeniously interwoven in Robert Planquette's opera Rip Van Winkle (1882).

Bibliography

• Attebery, Brian, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (1980).
• Rubin‐Dorsky, Jeffrey, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (1988).
• Tuttleton, James W. (ed.), Washington Irving: The Critical Reaction (1993).

— Suzanne Rahn

1783–1859, American author and diplomat, b. New York City. Irving was one of the first Americans to be recognized abroad as a man of letters, and he was a literary idol at home.

Early Life and Work

While he studied law, Irving amused himself by writing for periodicals such essays on New York society and the theater as the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. (1802–3). From 1804 to 1806 his older brothers financed his tour of France and Italy. On his return he joined William Irving and J. K. Paulding in publishing Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff & Others (1807–8), a series of humorous and satirical essays. Under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, he published A History of New York (1809), a satire that has been called the first great book of comic literature written by an American. Purporting to be a scholarly account of the Dutch occupation of the New World, the book is a burlesque of history books as well as a satire of politics in his own time.

Later Life and Mature Work

Irving went to England in 1815 to run the Liverpool branch of the family hardware business, but could not save it when the whole firm failed. Thereupon, with the encouragement of Walter Scott, Irving turned definitely to literature. The stories (including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (London, 1820), appeared serially in New York in 1819–20; their enthusiastic reception made Irving the best-known figure in American literature both at home and abroad. Bracebridge Hall (1822), the next volume of essays, although inferior to the previous book, was well received. However, his Tales of a Traveller (1824), written after visits to Germany and France, was a failure.

Irving became a diplomatic attaché at the American embassy in Madrid in 1826. There he produced his biography of Columbus (1828), largely based on the work of the Spanish historian Navarrete; The Conquest of Granada (1829), a romantic narrative; and the soft, casually charming Spanish sketches of The Alhambra (1832). After a short period at the American legation in London, he returned to New York. In search of colorful material, he made a journey to the frontier and wrote about the American West in A Tour of the Prairies (1835). From records furnished by John Jacob Astor, he wrote Astoria (1836), with Pierre Irving, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837).

Irving subsequently established himself at his estate, Sunnyside, near Tarrytown, N.Y., until he was sent to Madrid as American minister to Spain (1842–46). Once more at Sunnyside, he wrote a biography of Goldsmith (1849) and the miscellaneous sketches called Wolfert's Roost (1855) and labored at his biography of George Washington (5 vol., 1855–59), which he completed just before his death.

Irving was master of a graceful and unobtrusively sophisticated prose style. A gentle but effective satirist, he was the creator of a few widely loved essays and tales that have made his name endure.

Bibliography

Irving's journals were edited by W. P. Trent and G. S. Hellman (3 vol., 1919, repr. 1970); The Western Journals (1944) by J. F. McDermott. See also his life and letters by P. M. Irving (4 vol., 1864; repr. 1967); biographies by S. T. Williams (2 vol., 1935; repr. 1971), C. D. Warner (1981), and A. Burstein (2007); studies by W. L. Hedges (1965, repr. 1980) and J. Rubin-Dorsky (1988).

(1783-1859)

1802	Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. A collection of satires of social life in New York, mostly devoted to the theater. Written when Irving was only nineteen, the essays win him his first recognition. A New York publisher pirated the essays in 1824, and five editions are attributed to "the Author of the Sketch Book."
1807	Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others. Written with William Irving (1766-1821) and James Kirke Paulding (1778-1860), the miscellany includes political satires and critiques of theater, music, fashion, Jeffersonian democracy, and New York society. Named for a spicy salad, Salmagundi is the first collection of its kind in the United States and becomes instantly popular.
1809	A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker. A satirical record of the history of the Dutch settlement and a criticism of Jeffersonian democracy. The story introduces readers to Knickerbocker, who would become a famous American literary character. It is widely considered the first great book of comic literature written by an American.
1810	Biographical Sketch of Thomas Campbell. Irving supplies a biographical profile of the Scottish poet whose work Irving had compiled.
1819	The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. A collection of essays and tales, considered one of the most important books in American literary history and often credited with originating the American short story. The sketches show Irving's transition toward the Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott and his contemporaries. Included are the immensely popular Americanized versions of German folk tales, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the travel stories "Stratford on Avon" and "Westminster Abbey." The success of the book catapults Irving to celebrity status.
1822	Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists. A collection of forty-nine sketches and stories in the manner of his earlier Sketch Book with the same narrator, Geoffrey Crayon. It is chiefly remembered for "Dolph Heyliger," "The Storm Ship," "The Stout Gentleman," and "Student of Salamanca." Although widely read, it wins only moderate critical acclaim.
1824	Tales of a Traveller. Irving's only collection composed entirely of fiction receives unfavorable reviews until later lauded by Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The thirty-two stories are divided into four sections: the first is told by Englishmen, the second is about a young man who wants to be a writer, the third is about Italian bandits, and the final contains "The Devil and Tom Walker," one of Irving's finest stories.
1828	History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. A very popular biography based mostly on the work of the Spanish scholar Navarrete and written during Irving's time as diplomatic attaché in Spain. Highly acclaimed by reviewers, the book bolsters Irving's reputation and earns him an honorary LL.D. degree from Oxford and the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1830. It is the first of Irving's books not published under a pseudonym.
1829	A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. A recounting of the battles that ended Muslim power in Spain in the fifteenth century. Based on thorough research and highly regarded for its accuracy, Irving's book employs a fictional narrator to present history in the form of tales.
1831	Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus. Irving publishes a sequel to his Columbus biography, completing the story of the early explorers.
1832	The Alhambra. Considered Irving's Spanish Sketch Book, this is a collection of adapted Andalusian lore, anecdotes, and descriptions of architecture and scenery of the Moorish castle in Spain where Irving lived in 1829. The book would generate an interest in romantic Alhambraism and remain an important document in Granada's history.
1835	A Tour on the Prairies. The first volume of The Crayon Miscellany, which comprises three works published under the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon." A Tour is an account of Irving's travels westward from Arkansas into what is now Oklahoma and depicts his frontier adventures, including buffalo hunting, in a romantic reflection of western life.
1836	Astoria; or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains. An exciting history of the wealthy merchant John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company (1810-1813), which he had established in Fort Clatsop, Oregon, and sold to British traders during the War of 1812. Astor collaborated with Irving, providing records and helping gather former employees for interviews; the work remains a valuable history of the early fur trade.
1837	The Adventures of Captain Bonneville in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West. A narrative of Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville's (1793-1878) trapping expedition in the Rocky Mountains, taken from the explorer's personal maps and papers. The objective novel provides eastern readers with a picture of the American effort on the frontier and shows Irving's sympathy for Native Americans.
1855	Wolfert's Roost. An enormously popular collection of fables previously published in the Knickerbocker Magazine. It includes whimsical Spanish romances and scenes around Westchester County.
1855	The Life of George Washington. A popular biography that presents a broad view of the Revolutionary era as well as descriptions of Washington's contemporaries; it would remain the standard biography of Washington for decades. The final volume is published just weeks before Irving's death.
1866	Spanish Papers and Other Miscellanies. Irving's collection of Spanish chronicles and legends is published posthumously.

Quotes:

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."

"There is in every woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity, but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity."

"Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them."

"A woman's life is a history of the affections."

"There is a healthful hardiness about real dignity that never dreads contact and communion with others however humble."

"Rising genius always shoots out its rays from among the clouds, but these will gradually roll away and disappear as it ascends to its steady luster."

See more famous quotes by Washington Irving

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)